


younger than the mountains, older than the trees

by holsmi



Series: an open road, driven together [4]
Category: The End Of The Fucking World (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Americana, Established Relationship, F/M, Road Trips, alyssa finds out about the initial murder plan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:29:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26552872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holsmi/pseuds/holsmi
Summary: the great american roadtrip
Relationships: Alyssa/James (The End of the Fucking World)
Series: an open road, driven together [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1539334
Comments: 12
Kudos: 32





	younger than the mountains, older than the trees

When a teacher in school asked Alyssa, exasperated, just exactly where she saw herself in ten years, she yelled that she couldn’t _fucking_ care less and cursed her out so effectively that the teacher sat at her desk stunned for several minutes after Alyssa stormed out.

If she were to be asked that again a few years later, a murder and a marriage under her belt, she’d say the same fucking thing in the same fucking way, but with a bit more thought behind it.

Travel was the plan—always the plan. After their weddings but before Bonnie, they sat at the rickety table in their tiny flat’s kitchen with a laptop open in front of them, places to go and things to see at the touch of their fingertips, and planned a rough outline of the rest of their lives. The _hows_ and the _whens_ needed some fine tuning ahead of time, but the wheres? Fuck the wheres, she couldn’t care less about the wheres; they’d figure those out on the way.

They had to wait a bit for anything too adventurous—James wasn’t allowed to leave the country until the end of a probationary period, a caveat of the suspension of his sentence. It gave them time, though, to prepare.

James finished university with a generic business degree that he said felt a little soulless while he was working towards it, but promised variety in the work he could do afterwards.

(Alyssa hollered so loud her throat hurt at his graduation. A prim looking couple seated next to her gave her a dirty look and she flipped them off, telling them to get over it or go fuck themselves. It shocked them into silence and that was good enough for her.)

He did get a job pretty quickly after graduation, and he spent a lot of his time hunched over his laptop (sometimes at their flat, other times at the counter in her aunt’s cafe). Alyssa thought the idea of editing technical manuals to be on the verge of horrifying. She read over his shoulder one slow afternoon at the cafe, stopping as she passed by, and felt her eyes glaze over after a few minutes.

“I have no fucking clue how you can read that and not just die,” she said, resting her chin on his shoulder.

He shrugged, and her head bobbed with the motion. “It’s not so bad, not really.” He paused for a moment. “And, I can do it anywhere. For when we leave.”

She felt giddy at that, but that wasn’t good for her reputation, so she kissed him quickly on the cheek before punching him on the shoulder and walking away. She spied him cupping his cheek where she kissed him and felt a fond kind of disgust and rolled her eyes.

For her, in her vague web of plans, more schooling was the last thing she wanted. She liked the cafe, the odd people who came there, and being near her mum and the twins.

After James got his new job, he mentioned that she didn’t have to work if she didn’t want to. That set off a spark of anger, rooted in fear, as she thought of her mum—unemployed and dependent on Tony in so many ways (too many).

She wanted to shout through their flat, slamming things (“Just because I married you, doesn’t mean I’m your fucking kept woman, or whatever! You don’t own me!” she wanted to yell, but her therapist, Judy, said that’s _unhealthy_ ).

Instead, she focused on breathing and on the kitchen counter she leaned against. James, sitting at the table, recognized her effort and stammered, “No—no, only if you don’t want to. I know how much you like the café—“ _Of course he did,_ she thought. “—but you really don’t have to.” He handed her the paystub for his most recent check and _wow._

She looked it and said, “They really pay you like this to read those boring manuals?”

He shrugged, and his hands idly gestured for emphasis.

“Fuck. I’m glad you didn’t make me sign a pre-nup,” she said.

His jaw dropped dramatically and snatched the paystub back. “We’re not getting _divorced_ ,” he said, aghast, and she laughed, any lingering tension melting away.

Still, Alyssa didn’t like the idea of _just_ working at the cafe, no matter how much she liked it. What she ended up doing, well, it started as a _joke_.

Alyssa started documenting online which pubs in their travels around the UK were the best, on three criteria: cheap beer, tolerable music, and which ones didn’t have creepy old men that would hit on her. People seemed to like it enough that she spent a bit more time on it. Not nearly enough to make a living off of, because honestly _fuck_ the idea of being a professional blogger, but enough to have a presence.

She was reminded of the occasional tourist that would wander into her aunt’s cafe, taking up too much of the atmosphere in the room and snapping a ton of photos and talking about its rustic charm, when they really just meant outdated, and her stomach rolled a little.

Still, it did well enough that a company selling cameras offered to send her one for free if she’d give it a shout out on her blog. She’d gotten a few e-mails like that, but it was the only one she ended up agreeing to.

If most of the photos she posted involved James from an unflattering angle, well, that was her business. They never specified _how_ she had to use the camera.

\---

James had to go before the judge one last time before his record was cleared and the probationary period after the suspended charge was over. It was brief, and the judge smiled at him with kind eyes as she congratulated him and signed his paperwork.

After that, it was a whirl of obtaining passports, travel visas, packing, and planning. The trip they had planned would take months if they did it right, so they packed up the flat and put everything they wouldn’t need into storage on Alyssa’s aunt’s property.

Alyssa’s mum dropped them off at the airport early in the morning and hugged Alyssa so much and so hard that he worried briefly about her suffocating.

When her mum set Alyssa free with a few peppered kisses to Alyssa’s forehead, she turned briefly to James. He held up his arms for a hug too, while not really expecting one, and she looked him up and down before stroking Alyssa’s cheek and telling her to be safe.

He held up his arms until she got in the car and drove off. He put them down and turned to Alyssa, quirking his eyebrows and raising his arms again. She laughed and hugged him on the curb, standing among their suitcases.

Their flight to California had one layover, in Chicago, and they had enough time for dinner. Alyssa pulled him towards a place that sold deep dish pizza, because that’s what they thought they should do in Chicago.

Sitting down with it proved to be a different story. “What the fuck is this supposed to be?” she asked.

He poked his, a mess that looked more like congealed tomato soup than a pizza. “Maybe it’s because we’re in an airport?” he said.

She pushed hers away and said, “It’d better be, or we’re not staying more than ten minutes in Chicago.”

James leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms and bumping one leg against his carry-on just to make sure it was still there. America made him feel a little jumpy, and the frequent reminders to not leave your luggage unattended over the loud speaker didn’t help. “We don’t have to go there at all, you know. We can just drive right by it.”

“I’m not missing the Bean, James. It’s on the list,” she said.

The list was very important to Alyssa. Not that it wasn’t important to him, too, but she had spent hours cultivating of everything she wanted to see and sorted them into regions, from the kitschy to the obscure. The world’s largest block of cheese was just as important to see as the Grand Canyon (“it’s nearly 300 stone, James!” she’d said when he asked about it).

He’d suggested a few, but each time he showed her one she’d point out where it was, already on the list. Each time, Alyssa looked at him and said, “Oh yeah, picked that one out ages ago. Figured you’d want to see that.” He liked that she knew him so well.

She painstakingly marked all of out on a huge map of America that folded up small, and insisted that was all they needed to make their way. She said all of the highways in movies had signs for the really obscure spots, anyways. Despite their mutual hatred of smartphones, he’d gotten one with an international data plan and google maps installed, just in case, off and tucked away in his carry-on.

They landed in San Diego early the next morning and Alyssa left James outside of the car rental place to get the keys for their rental. He sat gingerly on her red hardshell suitcase as he tried to subtly rub his leg. It had been years since he got shot and he knew that he recovered better than any doctor even hoped for, but it still hurt, now and again. Sitting on a plane for hours didn’t help.

She came through the sliding glass doors and tossed the keys at him; he only barely caught them before they hit him in the face.

“Is there a reason you leased us a truck?” she asked, a hand on her hip.

“No,” he said and shook his head a little. There was, but it was a surprise and the surprise needed a pick-up truck.

“Really? Couldn’t have picked something smaller? Better mileage?”

“It was what they had online.” He paused for a second. “It has more leg room,” he added, but he could have gotten any number of non-truck cars for that.

Her eyes squinted at him, evaluating his response, but she must have been satisfied because it didn’t last long. She picked up half the bags and led him to where their car was parked.

The truck bed had a cover for it, and they slid their luggage into it before climbing into the front.

James laughed when he reached for a steering wheel and an ignition that wasn’t there, and laughed harder when he looked at Alyssa. She had her hands up like she was afraid the steering wheel would burn her.

It wasn’t that Alyssa couldn’t drive; it was just their _thing_. He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other in hers or on her thigh or flicking popcorn into her mouth, while she picked the music and told him where to turn and looked cute while she napped.

His laughter dissolved into snickers as he popped the CD book out of her hand and hung the keys on one of her outstretched fingers. He slouched in his seat and propped his good leg on the dashboard and started flipping through CDs.

“Really?” she asked, loud.

He slid his sunglasses up his nose and looked around the carpark and said, “We need to take a left out of here.”

She followed his instructions carefully, not even going the speed limit, both hands firmly on the steering wheel at ten and two.

“Are you okay?” he asked after a while.

“Yeah,” she said. Her favorite song was playing, one she always danced around to and accidentally-on-purpose hit him with her hair during, but she was only focusing on the road.

“Really? Because it’s forty-five here.”

“And?”

“You’re going thirty,” he said, and watched another car pass them while angrily flipping them off. He waved amicably at the driver.

“I’m driving a tank here, James! I’m driving a tank, on the wrong side of the road, and it’s so high up I’m starting to wonder where the fucking clouds are!” She took one hand off the wheel only long enough to wipe the palm of it on her shorts and repeated the action with the other hand. “Fucking shit, the plane felt closer to the ground than this.”

“Do you want me to take over?” he asked, soft.

“Yes,” she said and sighed. “No, I’m okay. I figured before we left that America’d be too fucking big for you to drive it alone. I might as well get used to it now.”

“Okay,” he said, and put a hand on her thigh, for old times’ sake.

“Stop that. I can’t be distracted,” she said and he took his hand away, and tried not to feel a little disappointed. She turned right at his direction and asked, “Where the hell are we going, anyways? We haven’t even looked at the list, yet.”

“It’s a surprise,” he said.

“A surprise?”

“Yeah.”

“Aren’t you even going to give me a hint?”

“No,” he said. “You’ll see when we get there.”

She huffed a little, but not in any way she meant, and dutifully made another right when he pointed.

Alyssa followed his directions out of California and into Arizona. James fed her candy and iced coffee while she drove so she didn’t have to take her hands off the wheel. Though, she threatened to crash the truck on purpose when she kept moving the straw around so she couldn’t drink it.

He led them to a dirt road with nothing much on it but a house and a big workshop. Well, it looked like a barn, but James knew it was a work shop from looking it up online and talking with the owner.

“We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere,” Alyssa commented.

“Yeah,” James said. “Turn here.”

“Here? What the fuck for?”

“It’s the surprise.”

“Okay,” she said. “It better be good, though.”

“Here’s hoping,” he said when she put the truck in park.

He clambered out of the truck and saw Adam, the owner, stride out of the barn to meet them. Adam had a kind of exuberance that reminded him of Todd, but was old enough to be his dad.

“Hey man!” he said, shaking James’s hand vigorously and then pulling him into an unexpected hug. He saw Alyssa behind him and pointed at her. “Ah, you must be the missus!” He pulled her into a hug too, her feet briefly leaving the ground.

“Glad you made it! Long trip, yeah?” Adam continued. “And good pick of truck; nothing like a Chevy. I have the hitch for you, too, just like you asked. Follow me, I just finished cleaning it after the last folks returned your rental.”

Adam led them into his barn and Alyssa whispered in his ear, “What the _fuck_ , James? What are doing here? We already have a rental car.”

He tangled his fingers in hers and whispered back, “It’s the surprise. You wanted me to find accommodations.”

James wanted to help in the planning, but he was busier with work and she was having too much fun doing it, but she let herself be pulled away from the part of the project. They wouldn’t book anything ahead of time, but they’d had to sleep in his dad’s car a few too many times after finding something particularly horrid in one of their motel rooms to not do _some_ research ahead of time.

In Adam’s barn was the workshop James saw on videochat with him, tools big and small scattered around the open room, and a tiny home in the middle.

Adam opened the one of the glass double doors to the nicely designed trailer with a flourish and said, “Well, missus, want to see your new home for a next while?”

“Is this what we needed the truck for?” she asked, stepping up into it. Inside, she shouting, “There’s a whole fucking house in here!”

He followed her up the steps and watched as she fiddled with the cabinets and faucet in the little kitchen, find the door to even littler bathroom, and as she inspected the loft at the top of a small and spindly staircase.

“Yeah, it’s too big to be pulled by a car. I found Adam online. I figured it’d be easier to rent this than have to find motels all the time.” It was like an Airbnb that they could take with them.

She moved to sit in a little windowed alcove meant to go above the truck bed that had a clear rounded ceiling.

“I like the shitty motels, though,” she said, but she liked it, he could tell in her bright eyes and her mouth, slightly upturned at the corners.

“Yeah.”

Adam popped his head in. “So, what do you kids think? Nice, right, built her myself! The wife helped designed it. She has an eye for color.” They looked around and nodded; the light color of the wood mixed nicely with the soft blues and yellows of the decoration.

“It’s nice. Nicer than the pictures,” James said.

“Yeah,” Alyssa said.

“Have you seen the deck?” Adam asked, excited. He hopped out of the house and opened some compartments under the double doors and slid out a good-sized wooden deck, with legs that folded out to keep it level. A compartment towards the back held a couple flat folded chairs and a table.

Adam held out his hands towards the deck, a big proud smile on his face and Alyssa said, “Okay, that’s fucking cool. I’m can’t even deny it.”

\---

Alyssa liked the little house more than she let on. This was a good surprise and was impressed that James could hitch it to the back of their rented pick-up truck with minimal help from Adam. She liked it even more when he already knew all of the things that Adam went to teach them about the tiny house; he even pulled a binder out of the back of the truck with information about the generator, the water tank.

He'd asked her Aunt Leigh what they’d need to know before they left, and _whoa_ was Leigh a wealth of information on the subject.

This kind of competency gave her the same kind of thrill that watching him hot wire a car did, like a million years ago, and wondered when the fuck she became so goddamned boring.

She’d seen people with these online before, elaborate builds that looked on the surface to be more about how many places you can hide storage than anything else. She watched the videos some unearned sense of judgement and figured she’d never want that for herself.

But then Adam pushed on a wall between the kitchenette and the bathroom and a vertical drawer popped out that could hold nearly an entire wardrobe’s worth of clothes if you hung them right. It must’ve been that part of her brain that was getting older (still only in her twenties) that activated with this kind of pure delight. She still felt older than she was, and she didn’t think that would never change.

“I like that so much,” Alyssa whispered to James, angrily, furious, when they saw it.

“What?” James whispered back.

“That,” she said. “I like that, like, a lot.”

He looked at her, trying to reconcile her tone, her words, and the vertical drawer and said, “Okay.”

When they got back in the car, after they signed the leasing paperwork and Adam and his wife (Carol) hugged them again, Alyssa made sure to get into the real passenger seat.

James joined her in the cab and started the engine. He pulled away carefully and Alyssa asked, “So, we can park this thing anywhere?”

“Not anywhere, but I don’t think we’ll have trouble finding a place.” He pulled out some folded-up papers from the front pocket of his button up shirt. “A couple for every region, all written down right here.” He also had his list saved in the google maps app on his phone, just in case.

“Should we go to one of those first, then?”

“Probably go to a market, get some supplies.”

Adam and Carol kept the place stocked with non-perishables, they said, like spices and flour, but it was up to her and James to keep up with everything else.

“Yeah, that sounds good,” she said.

\---

The plan, or the outline of the plan, was to weave through all of the southern states and then make their way north and go back west, looping back around to drop off the house and fly back home from San Diego. It was still early May, so they’d be able to escape the scorching temperatures before they came.

Alyssa had never experienced what 120 degrees fahrenheit felt like, and she wasn’t about to fucking find out this time around.

At the Grand Canyon, Alyssa surprised him with a donkey ride to the bottom that she booked months ago. She pushed him towards the pen of donkeys while he protested, and the tour guide was yelling instructions at them and the other people on the tour. James had one hand on the reins of a donkey and asked, eyes wide, “Are we really doing this?”

She hopped onto the back of her donkey and said, “Absolutely. We’re in America, James, we can’t _not_ ride a donkey at the Grand Canyon.”

He nodded, he always responded best when talked to him like that, like if she was confident about something then he could be, too. “Right,” he said, maneuvering himself onto the donkey’s back.

Alyssa took pictures as they went down the trail and snapped one of James and his donkey, James’s head low as he spoke quietly to it. “That’s a nice donkey, this is a mutually beneficial relationship we have here,” he said to it. “If I go down I am taking you with me.”

At the top of the Hoover Dam, Alyssa listened while James read facts about it off a pamphlet, although she was mostly imagining throwing something off the edge and watching it fall. It was a beautiful view, though.

They found a traveling carnival in Utah and ate junk food and made out at the top of a ferris wheel. James won her an impossibly large teddy bear at one of the games that she gave to a little girl who watched him win it with wide eyes. It wouldn’t’ve fit in the car or the house, anyways, and she told him as much when he grinned with his mouth closed at her.

“Right, of course,” he said and kissed her firmly on her temple, an arm tight around her shoulder.

“Shut up,” she replied, but put an arm around his waist as they walked on. “Want to go on the bumper cars?”

“Yeah.”

When they passed into Texas, they saw a sign advertising _Carl’s Diner, best burgers this side of the Mississippi!_ _Next exit!_

“Bold claim,” Alyssa said. “Are you hungry?”

“I could eat,” he said, clicking on the directional to get off at the exit.

They pulled into the diner’s carpark and James held the door to the restaurant. The inside was decorated with vintage red vinyl and a retro aesthetic, and the memory of calling that poor waitress a _fucking cunt_ flashed through her mind again. She would never live that one down, not even in her own brain.

“Care for a banana split?” James asked, remembering it, too. He had that cute small smile on his face and she couldn’t be mad at him.

An older woman with a nametag reading _Madge_ took their order after they were seated, and crooned over how cute she thought they were.

“Aren’t you two sweet. Newlyweds?” she asked.

“No, we’ve been married for a few years now,” James said.

“Oh, and that accent! Where are you two from?”

They answered her litany of questions and looked at each other through the corner of their eyes. Madge was the friendliest American they’d met, yet, and they’d met a lot of friendly Americans. Alyssa kind of liked it—she may have to take a few notes for when she went back to Leigh’s café.

“And how’d you two meet? High school sweethearts?” she asked after they finished ordering, like she was asking if they wanted a side of fries.

“Yeah,” Alyssa said. That was what she always said when asked, because it was close enough to the truth to not feel like lying.

The truth that they were two unbelievably _fucked up_ kids when they met didn’t need to be mentioned to every curious stranger who asked.

\---

James, if asked, could come up with at least five serious contenders for the worst day of his life, without having to think for more than a minute.

One of them was the day Mark, his therapist, asked him why he started dating Alyssa. James talked about her enough to Mark that it was natural he’d ask.

James remembered that when he was seventeen, before they ran away, he had methodically planned out her murder, disposing of her body, and returning to his life without any stress. Now, he could barely conjure the images in his mind without feeling like he could cry and throw up at the same time.

It must have shown on his face, and he could feel his mouth screwing up, his eyes scrunching closed as the thought of Alyssa hurt by his own hands tormented him.

“Hey, hey, James, you’re okay. You’re safe here,” Mark said and James tried to focus on his words. He took a few deep breaths and nodded. “Can you tell me what happened just now?”

Mark had a way, in therapy, of staying silent long enough that James wanted to keep talking, prompting only with his eyes. He liked that about Mark, it was helpful.

It was like through that method that he got James to detail the whole story. Mark had already known about killing the professor, about how he and Alyssa ran away together, but James hadn’t told him this, hadn’t told anybody.

After James finished, Mark put down his pen, unused for the whole time he spoke, and rubbed his eyes under his glasses.

“Thank you for telling me that, James. That’s a lot for one young man to carry,” he said. That was another thing he liked about Mark; he never judged.

At the end of the session, which went on longer than it normally did, out of necessity (something that never happened before or after), Mark strongly encouraged he tell Alyssa before their wedding day.

Mark never told him what to do, only suggested he do things with various levels of emphasis.

It wasn’t long after that that he told Alyssa. He normally did things Mark strongly encouraged him to do, no matter how little he wanted to do them, although he would’ve been happy putting it off for as long as he could.

They were lying in bed one night, James playing with the engagement ring on her finger as she told the story of how a girl at her lunch table texted her something instead of saying it to her, and how it made her so angry she broke her phone.

“You know, I don’t think I ever asked,” she started, “why did you come with me, back then?”

He could feel Mark gently encouraging him in the back of his head and James went still, stammering. He could lie, he wouldn’t but he could tell her something fanciful, like she was a breath of fresh air for him. Or something superficial that she’d smack his shoulder for but still like, like he thought she was hot.

“I, uhh, um,” he said instead.

“Jesus, James, it doesn’t have to be that hard, and you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want,” she said.

He had to tell her.

He sat up in bed and rested his back against the wall, forcing her to shift from where she rested her head on his shoulder. The blanket pooled around her waist and her face twisted in concern. James worried at the skin of his burned hand with the pad of his thumb.

“James? What is it?” she asked. “You’re scaring me, now.”

“Sorry,” he said and rubbed his hand harder. He tried to regulate his breathing and he could feel his cheeks heating up with pooling blood. “I don’t know how to say it.”

“Here,” she said and pulled him down so he was lying on his back and she laid next to him. He stared at the ceiling. “I heard it’s easier to say things that are hard to someone if you can’t see them.”

He nodded and swallowed thickly. “Before I met you, I, ah,” he started. “I thought I was a psychopath. I hadn’t felt anything, anything at all, since my mum died.” He held up his burned hand. “That’s why I put my hand in a grease fryer.”

“Okay.”

“Um. I had—there were some animals, they belonged to neighbors that I, ah. That I—that I killed. And I thought what I wanted was to, um. To kill—um.”

 _Holy fuck_ , Alyssa thought. She remembered sitting in that little café by the train station with a plate of chips between them, demanding to know why he had a knife on him.

He had gone silent, and she couldn’t feel him moving at all beside her. She peeked over at him, just to see if he was still fucking breathing, and saw his eyes quickly dart away from her.

“So, you were gonna kill—”

“Yeah,” he interrupted, quiet and strained.

Okay, she thought. “Okay.”

“Okay?” he asked, a little louder.

Alyssa rolled over and piled her hands on his chest, resting her chin on them, while she studied his face. His eyes quickly darted between her and the ceiling while she looked at him.

She thought about how they ate ice cream in the park a couple months ago and he played peekaboo with a random baby, and bought the kid another cone when she dropped it on the ground after laughing too hard.

She also thought about how he waited for like four hours with a bowl of milk outside of the café for a stray cat to come back, after it ran away from James after he tried to pet it. He cried on the drive home that night because he was so worried that the cat wouldn’t be safe.

She tilted her head and thought about James, at six, watching his mother kill herself in front of him and what that probably does to a person.

And she thought about how he saved her life in the end.

“When did you change your mind?”

“What?”

“When did you decide not to kill me? We’ve been sleeping together for like a couple years now. You’ve had the chance.”

He looked at her, shocked. “I—I couldn’t—what?”

“I know,” she said. “When did you change your mind?”

He took a deep breath and stared at the ceiling again and she watched as his mouth tried to form the words.

“I don’t know for sure; I don’t think I could’ve ever gone through with it, really.” He paused. “But that night, after dancing in the professor’s house. You were asleep upstairs and you looked so peaceful.” His voice had gone quiet and thick and in the dim light in the room, she could see a steady stream of tears falling from the corner of his eyes. She wondered if they were pooling at the base of his neck or they were absorbed by the pillow.

“I didn’t want anything bad to ever happen to you,” he continued. “So, I slept on the floor next to you, cause I wanted to keep you safe.”

“Okay,” she said, honestly satisfied. She rolled off of him onto her side, expecting to be the little spoon for the next few hours.

He never moved with her and peeked back over her shoulder at him. He was still staring at the ceiling, his fingers fiddling with the hem of the blanket where it lay across his chest.

His mouth was open a little and he looked at her like he couldn’t believe she was still there, like she’d be spooked if he moved.

“Really?” he asked quietly. “That’s it?”

She rolled back over and rested her weight on her elbow. “Um, yeah? Like, I don’t _love_ that that’s why you started dating me but that’s not who you are now. A bird flew into our window last week and you made me give it a eulogy while you buried it and cried. You’re not tough, James, and that’s okay.”

He had the audacity to look indignant.

“Don’t tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re not wrong,” he admitted.

“Good,” she said. “I love you, you know. This doesn’t change that.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

She rolled back over and he said, “I love you, too.”

“Go on,” she sighed, but he still hadn’t moved. “Are you gonna cuddle me, or what?”

“Oh!” he said and moved to spoon her from behind, tucking an arm around her waist and under her head. She pulled him closer and fell asleep.

\---

Madge brought them a free banana split while they paid their bill. “I heard you two talking about it when you came in. It’s on the house, dears,” she said.

They shrugged, ate it, and tipped her double before heading back to the truck.

They parked the truck and the tiny home in a campground on the way to Austin, but far enough away that the ambient light of the city wouldn’t cause any light pollution that would block out the stars.

Alyssa sat under a blanket in the little glass covered alcove, big enough for them both if they cuddled, while James made them tea in the kitchenette.

He passed hers to her and maneuvered himself behind her, and she covered him as best she could with the blanket. She sighed and leaned against him.

“What do you think about doing this all the time?” he asked.

“What do you mean? We’re doing nothing but this for, like, two more months.”

“No, like,” he gestured around him, “this. The tiny house thing.”

“What? Like, when we get back home?”

“Yeah.”

“I dunno,” she said. “I kind of like it. This is nice. We’d have to get a bigger car, though. Your dad’s old car is barely getting us from place to place now.”

“Yeah, we would. I’m okay with that, I think.”

“Okay.”

“Think Adam knows anyone in the UK he could recommend? I want that wardrobe and I’m not settling for less.” She paused. “The deck, too. I want the deck.”

“Ha, okay. And, maybe? We could ask. But I already, ah, talked to Todd about it.”

“Todd? What does he have to do with this?”

“He was the one who told me to look into these for our trip. Said he a few friends were looking to go into business building them. Has a friend who’s an electrician, who has a friend who’s a plumber.”

“Todd.”

“Yeah. He showed me a prototype they designed. It was nice. I’m sure they could add in the deck, and the wardrobe.”

“Hmm. What about the spice wall?” Adam and Carol made the backsplash behind the sink metal, and put magnet on the lids of all the spices so they stuck to the wall, and didn’t fall off while the house was moving. “I want the spice wall, too.”

“I’m sure they can do the spice wall. Or, I bet we could do ourselves. Can’t be too hard.”

“Okay, then. Let’s let Todd build us a house, then.”

“Okay.”

“Think he can have it done by the time we get back?”

“Maybe. We can ask,” he said, tucking her head under his chin.

“Okay.”

“So, what’s on the list near Austin?”

**Author's Note:**

> I want to give special thanks TheCoolestBowtie. Your comment was so nice, I ended up rereading my own series, rewatching the show, and then popping out this fic. The great american roadtrip was always the plan, if I were to write a fourth one, but I never had the motivation to do this. So thank you!
> 
> I hope everyone enjoyed! But, if I'm the only one who wanted/like this, I regret literally nothing. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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